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Kiva loans that change lives

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

As of last year, according to the report A Living Death Sentence: Sentenced to Die Behind Bars For WHAT? released by the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 3,200 people were serving life in prison without parole for non-violent crimes. Of the 3,278 prisoners--mostly racial minorities--doing life for nonviolent crimes, 63% were sentenced by federal courts; the rest are in nine state prison systems. Most of these cases were sentenced under mandatory minimum guidelines, for which judges had no choice but to dole out a life without parole sentence. People got life without parole for things like:

Possessing a crack pipe

Possessing a bottle cap containing a trace amount of heroin (too minute to be weighed)

Having traces of cocaine in clothes pockets that were invisible to the naked eye but detected in lab tests

Having a single crack rock at home

Possessing 32 grams of marijuana (worth about $380 in California) with intent to distribute

Passing out several grams of LSD at a Grateful Dead show

Acting as a go-between in the sale of $10 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop

Selling a single crack rock

Verbally negotiating another man's sale of two small pieces of fake crack to an undercover cop

Attempting to cash a stolen check

Possessing stolen scrap metal (the offender was a junk dealer)—10 valves and one elbow pipe

Possessing stolen wrenches

Siphoning gasoline from a truck

Stealing tools from a shed and a welding machine from a front yard

Shoplifting three belts from a department store

Shoplifting several digital cameras

Shoplifting two jerseys from an athletic store

Taking a television, circular saw, and power converter from a vacant house

Breaking into a closed liquor store in the middle of the night

Making a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car

Being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm

Taking an abusive stepfather's gun from their shared home

The data examined by the ACLU comes from the federal prison system and nine state penal systems that responded to open records requests. In other words, the true number of nonviolent offenders serving life without parole is much higher.

"For 3,278 people, it was nonviolent offenses like stealing a $159 jacket or serving as a middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. An estimated 65% of them are Black. Many of them were struggling with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when they committed their crimes. None of them will ever come home to their parents and children. And taxpayers are spending billions to keep them behind bars.

At the very least, 3,728 will die in prison for nonviolent offenses, costing the US nearly $2 billion. The ACLU makes recommendations for reform. It calls on the states and federal government to eliminate laws that mandate or allow life without parole for nonviolent crimes, and strongly urges state governors, as well as the Obama administration, to commute such disproportionate punishments. "Life without parole sentences for nonviolent offenses defy common sense," it concludes, and "are grotesquely out of proportion to the conduct they seek to punish."